People ask what I do, and lately why I do it the way I do. The honest answer isn’t really about me. It goes back to a few people who gave me room, early, before I’d done much to earn it.
The best thing any of them did for me wasn’t having the answer. It was making room and trusting me to fill it.
The origin, for me, is a manager at Citibank in Sioux Falls who gave me room to be curious. That curiosity turned into automating the scheduling of phone reps for the Cardmember retention group, which earned a Service Excellence award. More than the award, it was my first real exposure to the machinery of the work, SAS, JCL, the mainframe, Unix, dialer systems, Oracle, even the Mac servers. She could have kept me in my lane. She let me wander into all of it instead.
Amy DeBerg was my manager at Service One International and then The Credit Store, and she was the unlock. Citibank lit the curiosity. Amy is the one who put it into motion. She took a real chance on me and gave me room to run at problems in a way I’d now call entrepreneurship, though at the time I had no name for it. And she made it safe, a place to learn, to hone the craft, to get things wrong without fear. A lot of who I became traces back to her.
Del Hampton gave me room to spread my wings. At Liberty Enterprises he handed me the Internet Services team to lead, embraced my creativity rather than reining it in, and shaped how I think about process and discipline. Years later, when I was CTO at FiData, Del led our project management and became my trusted advisor. Sit with that for a second. A man who had once been my boss chose to hand me the room to lead, and then stood beside me as counsel instead of competing with it. I’m not sure I understood at the time how rare that grace was.
Blake Allen, FiData’s CEO, gave me room to be the best technologist I could be. He trusted me to go solve automated underwriting for credit unions and community banks when it was hard and unproven, and he taught me how a boardroom actually works. He could have kept all of that close. He made room for me in it instead.
None of the four did it by having the answers for me. They did it by making space and trusting me inside it, and letting me find my own way to the thing, sometimes by getting it wrong first. That’s what made me, far more than anything I worked out on my own.
So when people ask what I’m trying to do now, that’s the honest answer. Give people room. Get out of the way enough that they can become more than their title says they are. Trust them with the hard thing before it’s obvious they’re ready.
These days it looks smaller and quieter than it sounds. Someone brings me a problem they want solved, and everything in me wants to solve it right there, cleanly, because I can and it feels like help. Giving room is choosing not to. It’s asking the question instead of answering it, then staying quiet long enough for them to get there on their own, even when I could get there faster. It’s handing someone the thing I’m not sure they’re ready for and staying close in case it wobbles, instead of taking it back.
It doesn’t come to me the way it came to them. My instinct is still to fill the silence, and most days I only half manage it. But in the moments I do, I really feel the person leave a little bigger. I can’t always prove it. The validation, when it comes, is later and quiet. They stop needing me for that thing. Or I catch them giving someone else the same room I was given. That’s the proof, and it outlasts any answer I could have handed them.
But I know what their room did for me. So room is what I try to give.
There are more of them than I could name here. I still measure whether I’ve gotten it right by all of them.